Whoopi Goldberg presents Moms Mabley

'A woman is a woman till the day she dies. But a man's a man only as long as he can," said Moms Mabley.

Finally, because good documentaries take a long time to put together and produce, we will get to see Whoopi Goldberg's historical presentation of "Moms Mabley."

Whoopi knows that Moms was the original Queen of Comedy, and even I saw her once upon a time in a guest appearance in what I recall was the Bon Soir nightclub on 8th Street in Greenwich Village.

She was a true pioneer. So HBO and Whoopi kick this off at the Apollo Theater on Nov. 7 and there'll be a big to-do and dinner at Sylvia's famous restaurant after.

The entire show biz/gossip/"The View" and comedy world of stardom will try to cram itself into this opening, but I'm sure HBO will be showing Whoopi's version of Moms Mabley in the near future.

The night before, on Nov. 6, there'll be another big happening — the Bob Woodruff Foundation and the N.Y. Comedy Festival will be standing up for our heroes. This happens in the theater of Madison Square Garden and you can actually buy tickets by emailing ufh@)bobwoodrufffoundation.org. Bill Cosby, Jon Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld, Bruce Springsteen, Roger Waters and other "surprise guests" will be there doing their damndest for men and women who have done their damndest for all of us.

"France still gets more foreign tourists than most any other country ... While tourists to Israel sometimes suffer from 'Jerusalem syndrome,' imagining themselves in direct contact with God, some Japanese tourists suffer from what is called the 'Paris Syndrome,' distraught at the difference between what they imagine and what they find.

"Of course, as Walt Whitman wrote ... Paris contains multitudes, and most visitors go away having found just enough of what they craved to develop a lifelong yearning to return."

So wrote Steven Erlanger in The New York Times on Oct. 18. His article examined how Paris has changed and how it has not changed.

So many people remarked on this brief but meaningful piece of writing that I just thought I'd bring it up again so you can reference the whole of it.

It put me in mind of how Paris changes and doesn't, even from the time after Proust, Hemingway, Shakespeare and company, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, the Jazz Age, World Wars I and II, Chanel's trousers for women and Dior's "New Look," etc.